Today, he is a city bus driver — and a recovered drug user who once lived homeless and hungry.

Corker’s large frame is a common sight at the Salvation Army, whose advisory council he serves on. He shares his story at Salvation Army events, as well as with other organizations and in public schools.

The shelter, on East Lancaster Avenue, welcomed Corker after he became stranded in Fort Worth following a drug binge in the mid-2000s.

It is where he found the programs that turned his life around, helping him get a home and a steady job, and stay clean and sober for seven years now.

“People ask me how it felt to be an N.F.L. player who competed at the highest level, and then come live in a homeless shelter,” said Corker, 53.

“I tell them it was probably the greatest day of my life.”

A Miami native, Corker was an All-American at Oklahoma State, where he played from 1976 to 1979. He finished as the school’s all-time leading tackler and was named Big Eight Defensive Player of the Year in 1978.

Drafted by the Houston Oilers, he played in the N.F.L. through 1982 before moving to the United States Football League, now defunct. In 1983, while playing for the Michigan Panthers, he was named the league’s defensive player of the year. He eventually returned to the N.F.L., playing for the Packers in 1988.

Corker earned hundreds of thousands of dollars playing pro ball. But his cocaine habit was slowly destroying him.

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Then one day, on a trip from Odessa to Dallas to pick up a cargo of electronics, he stopped in Fort Worth to find drugs.

He left the truck near Vickery Boulevard and Tucker Street. That was the last he saw of it.

“Because of my capacity to get high, I couldn’t remember where I left the truck,” he said. “I was walking around the city of Fort Worth asking people if they’d seen a parked tractor-trailer truck on the side of the road.”

With nowhere else to go, Corker wandered into the Salvation Army.

Corker’s weight had dropped to a gaunt 185 pounds, and his long legs dangled over the end of his bunk in the men’s dormitory.

“I figured I’d blow off a couple days here,” he said. “But to be inside from the elements consistently for the first time in years, it gave me the belief that I could do this. I could get my life back.”

Corker committed himself to the self-improvement programs and drug counseling.

Chris Bryant, a Salvation Army lieutenant, worked at the shelter in 2008 and remembers Corker reaching out to other homeless men.